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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

The nook color really can be a tablet

So not long ago I decided I wanted just a little more from my color nook, for you see under the hood is actually an android tablet. However, Barnes & Noble has locked away the coolest parts in favor of a nice stable eReader.

Like cell phones, Barnes & Noble is selling these eReaders as a loss leader (well nearly at cost I think) in hopes of getting you to buy a bunch of ebooks over a period of many years. A locked in audience of people who can only buy very profitable eBooks from them.However, rooting the color nook opens the color nook to the world that is the Android Marketplace with thousands of fairly cool apps available. Like Angry Birds, Skype, and so many more. However the Color Nook remains fully functional as a Nook, but with a whole lot more toys under "extras".

The whole procedure is fairly simple, but has to be followed very closely. The hardest part is taking the disk image and writing it to a micro sd card.

The procedure goes this way:1. Fully activate your nook2. Make sure the Color Nook has been upgraded to version 1.13. Boot the Nook from the sd card4. The Color Nook will shutdown when done5. Remove the sd card6. Restart the Color Nook7. setup google talk and configure your gmail account on the Nook.

The full procedure is at http://forum.androidcentral.com/barnes-noble-nook-color/54069-guide-how-root-your-nook-color.html#post530373 but you have to signup on the site in order to get the Urls for the pieces.

So far quite a few things off the Android Marketplace work just fine. You just need to get used to using soft keys to replace the buttons not on the Nook.